My degradation was administered in imperceptible degrees, an almost irresistible progression from innocence to depravity over the course of one glorious summer.
It began with a sacred trust. I was a girl on the cusp of womanhood, awkward and painfully shy, weeks away from a college life that I was woefully unprepared for. She was a casual acquiantance of my parents, worldly and refined, an older woman with a silver tongue. She took me under her wing, promising that things would get better, that I’d grow into myself. She showed me things outside the bubble of my suburban existence - opera, fine dining, she took me to my first Shakespeare play, an outdoor performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream. She paraded me round on her arm and shielded me from a world that scared me.
But there was always the progression, that transformation from guardian and confidant, to something else entirely.
Like best girlfriends, she took me shopping. But when she suggested outfits that I might like, they always suited her taste, not mine. She never asked, she always told. She guided my instincts and moulded my expectations, creating something in me that was not wholly my own. Yet, the gradient was so slight that I never even noticed it happening.
With hindsight, it seems so obvious.
When it finally came, I barely even flinched from it.
“Get down on your knees,” she said casually, tossing the directive into the conversation like a request to pass the salt.
We were in the bathroom in a restaurant downtown, she was fixing her lipstick, gazing into the mirror like a thousand women before her.
“I don’t…” I began, but a flicker in her eyes stopped me in my tracks.
She turned and leaned back on the bathroom counter, tilting her head to the side and regarding me coldly.
“Get down on your knees,” she repeated, lacing her words with an acid tone that sent shivers down my spine and caused the little hairs on the back of my neck to stand up on end.
To my surprise, I felt myself shuffling my skirt up my thighs and lowering myself to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, gazing up at her with a mixture of awe and fear.
Even then, though it shocks me to admit, it never felt wrong. I simply did as I was told, reclining in the embrace of my trust for the older woman, unable to see what should have been so readily apparent.
And when she hiked her skirt up and rolled down her pantyhose, I merely looked on with distant surprise, faintly shocked that this respectable woman was wearing no panties, vaguely intrigued by the smooth, pale flesh of her shaven sex.
It wasn’t until she laid her hand on my head that I realized what was happening. It wasn’t until she pulled me gently towards her, positioning my face mere inches from her most private place, that I perceived the wrongness of her actions. And in that instant, the trust between us shattered into a million pieces and my entire worldview pivoted on a previously unknown axis.
I should have stood then, screamed for help, battered down the door and fought her with every ounce of my strength.
But I didn’t. I simply kneeled there, feeling her fingers tighten their grip in my hair, feeling the gentle force that pulled me forward increasing and doing nothing to resist it.
Because in that moment, in that strange, bewildering fragment of time, all that I could think about was the unfamiliar vista of pink flesh before me and the maddening heat rising from her body that burned my cheeks and provoked a heat of my own, deep and unfamiliar, a friend I’d never met. And underneath it all, an alien thought, a nagging question that simply would not be quieted, the inevitable endpoint of my downfall: what could I do to please her?
It began with a sacred trust. I was a girl on the cusp of womanhood, awkward and painfully shy, weeks away from a college life that I was woefully unprepared for. She was a casual acquiantance of my parents, worldly and refined, an older woman with a silver tongue. She took me under her wing, promising that things would get better, that I’d grow into myself. She showed me things outside the bubble of my suburban existence - opera, fine dining, she took me to my first Shakespeare play, an outdoor performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream. She paraded me round on her arm and shielded me from a world that scared me.
But there was always the progression, that transformation from guardian and confidant, to something else entirely.
Like best girlfriends, she took me shopping. But when she suggested outfits that I might like, they always suited her taste, not mine. She never asked, she always told. She guided my instincts and moulded my expectations, creating something in me that was not wholly my own. Yet, the gradient was so slight that I never even noticed it happening.
With hindsight, it seems so obvious.
When it finally came, I barely even flinched from it.
“Get down on your knees,” she said casually, tossing the directive into the conversation like a request to pass the salt.
We were in the bathroom in a restaurant downtown, she was fixing her lipstick, gazing into the mirror like a thousand women before her.
“I don’t…” I began, but a flicker in her eyes stopped me in my tracks.
She turned and leaned back on the bathroom counter, tilting her head to the side and regarding me coldly.
“Get down on your knees,” she repeated, lacing her words with an acid tone that sent shivers down my spine and caused the little hairs on the back of my neck to stand up on end.
To my surprise, I felt myself shuffling my skirt up my thighs and lowering myself to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, gazing up at her with a mixture of awe and fear.
Even then, though it shocks me to admit, it never felt wrong. I simply did as I was told, reclining in the embrace of my trust for the older woman, unable to see what should have been so readily apparent.
And when she hiked her skirt up and rolled down her pantyhose, I merely looked on with distant surprise, faintly shocked that this respectable woman was wearing no panties, vaguely intrigued by the smooth, pale flesh of her shaven sex.
It wasn’t until she laid her hand on my head that I realized what was happening. It wasn’t until she pulled me gently towards her, positioning my face mere inches from her most private place, that I perceived the wrongness of her actions. And in that instant, the trust between us shattered into a million pieces and my entire worldview pivoted on a previously unknown axis.
I should have stood then, screamed for help, battered down the door and fought her with every ounce of my strength.
But I didn’t. I simply kneeled there, feeling her fingers tighten their grip in my hair, feeling the gentle force that pulled me forward increasing and doing nothing to resist it.
Because in that moment, in that strange, bewildering fragment of time, all that I could think about was the unfamiliar vista of pink flesh before me and the maddening heat rising from her body that burned my cheeks and provoked a heat of my own, deep and unfamiliar, a friend I’d never met. And underneath it all, an alien thought, a nagging question that simply would not be quieted, the inevitable endpoint of my downfall: what could I do to please her?
